This document is not field policy and has not been subject to field vote. It is a working document provided as a good-faith attempt to describe the current shared viewpoint of the Fluids faculty. Per field rules, the exam committee decides the scope of the exam and questions are at the discretion of the committee.
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Q exam name: Fluid mechanics
Field(s) to which it applies: AE, ME
Core physical principles covered: conservation and accounting principles for fluids (governing equations e.g. Navier-Stokes, Stokes, Laplace, Bernoulli eqns for mass, momentum, streamfunction, velocity potential and vorticity in integral and differential form), kinematics of fluids (velocity gradient, strain, and rotation tensors and their properties), constitutive relations for Newtonian fluids, dimensional analysis and nondimensional parameters for fluid flows, solution of PDEs for fluid mechanical problems, basic tensor operations, complex mathematics and its use in solving 2D potential flows.
The exam committee decides the scope of the exam and questions are at the discretion of the committee; however, this list is provided as a good-faith outline of topics covered as a way to frame student’s broad study of fluid mechanics as a discipline.
Recommended textbooks for study: Batchelor Introduction to Fluid Dynamics, Panton Incompressible Flow, Kundu and Cohen Fluid Mechanics
Classes required before Q exam: none
Classes strongly recommended before Q exam: for those with UG ME or AE degrees: MAE 6010, MAE 6020. For those without UG ME/AE training: MAE 3230 and MAE 5230 or equivalent.
Classes deemed helpful but usually not taken before Q exam: MAE 6810 Methods of Applied Mathematics, MAE 6240 Physics of Micro- and Nanoscale Fluid Mechanics, MAE 6230 Computational Fluid Dynamics